05 February 2006

They do indeed go everywhere. Andreas Wieslander and his band of intrepid film makers/musicians/gamers pay homage to Parappa the Rapper in this excellent video, which is a cover of “Cheep Cheep Cooking Chicken’s Rap” from the first title in the PaRappa series.

28 January 2006

As with many of the Asian games, there’s a nominally massively multiplayer lobby, which you enter minimally multiplayer games from. You play the game in order to earn virtual cash, plus you buy a different sort of virtual cash. You can then buy further accessories for your character (clothes, character customization, etc) and new stuff to play (in this case, songs) with that money.

21 January 2006

Ten years ago, Sony brought three dimensions, as well as the concept of "maturity", to the video gaming masses. And yet, when many people think back to the "PlayStation era", a hyper realistic character in a 3D landscape doesn't necessarily come to mind. Instead, they think of a flat cartoony dog that could rap.

Graphics and images have been an integral part of every game ever made -- it's a visual medium, after all. What you see is what you get. Even the most primitive games that couldn't draw proper images onscreen at least gave you ASCII art or text. And so it went, throughout gaming history, until Parappa the Rapper finally brought a new sense into play: in NanaOn-Sha's PSone masterpiece, you had to rely on your ears as much as your eyes.

A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, rhythm action game, or rhythm game, is a type of video game where the gameplay is oriented almost entirely around the player's ability to follow a musical beat and stay with the rhythm of the game's soundtrack. Since the game play for this type of game is largely aural rather than visual, this type of game is similar to audio games. However, music games generally require a visual component as well.

Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm video game in the style of PaRappa the Rapper and more recently Amplitude. The game was unique in its execution, the software loaded into RAM enabling the user to remove the game-disc and insert a music CD.